America’s religious people, often opponents of formal icons, have made
the Bible, as a physical object, an icon. This was Marty’s address to
the Society of Biblical Literature at the organization’s centennial meeting in 1980.

Americas Iconic Book

“We are all critics, I trust, and higher critics too.” Thus Professor
Angus Crawford, without spelling out the details of who “we” were,
rushed to judgment from the Theological Seminary of Virginia during a debate
at the Episcopal Church Congress in 1896.{1}

The public, be it churchgoing or in the
general culture, did not share those conclusions. Four years before Crawford
spoke, during critic Charles A. Briggss heresy trial in New York, newspapers
nationally covered the subject. Most of them pointed to the growing gap between
the scholars and the public. One could choose from scores of sources, but this
comment from the Savannah, Georgia, News is typical:

The great majority of Christians regard
the Bible as the inspired work of God, and therefore, cannot contain errors.
An admission that it does contain errors opens the door to doubts, and when
doubts are once entertained, it is a difficult matter to place a limit upon
them. Professor Briggss doctrines may be entirely satisfactory to those
who clearly understood them, but it is about impossible to make them understood
by the masses. To the average mind the whole Bible is true, or it is not the
inspired work of God.{2}

Events during the first two decades of
American biblical criticism before the turn of the century set the mold for
controversy that has not ended at the end of a century of such scholarship.
Crawfords word, “we are all critics, I trust, and higher critics
too,” is true of scholars at Jewish, Roman Catholic, nondenominational,
mainline Protestant, secular graduate, andtheir enemies would have itsome
of the flagship evangelical schools. Wherever people in the humanities teach
others how to analyze the historical, formal, and structural elements of texts
and wherever there are no vested interests in fending off ecclesiastical resistance
to the critical, the critical methods and outlooks prevail. Yet the Savannah
News report could be written even today about much of the churchgoing
outlook and, if polls are a measure, also about much of unchurched America.
The public still connects criticism with the spotting of errors and the planting
of doubts. A century of biblical criticism, however presented to the public
it may be, has produced little difference.

Recent Gallup Pollsshall we call
them centennial presents to the Society of Biblical Literaturefind that
42 percent of the general public finds the whole Bible to be inerrant. We must
presume that at least that many are therefore resistant to critical scholarship.
Gallup found 48 percent of the self-named Protestants in his sample and 41 percent
of the Roman Catholics to be on the anticritical side.{3} This side is powerful
beyond its numbers because its leadership has effectively mobilized sentiment.
Anticritical forces have been outspoken in intradenominational warfare and in
the 1980s are being heard in public school board rooms, where battles in defense
of biblical creationism are being waged as intensely as they were in 1925 at
the time of the Scopes trial in Tennessee.

In this division between camps and the
opposition to critical study something is going on that reaches beyond the merely
cognitive, beyond the critical-analytic method. The resistance to critical understanding,
I propose, has its root in what Suzanne Langer would say lies “much deeper
than any conscious purpose, . . .in that substratum of the mind, the realm of
fundamental ideas.”{4} Fundamental ideas which José Ortega y Gasset
calls creencias, are ideas so deep that we do not even know we hold them.
They are not the ideas that we “have” but the ideas that we “are.”
And these creencias hook up with certain vigencias, binding customs
of a culture, customs that have a hold much stronger than that which law itself
can impose.{5} Anthropologist George Boas showed his at-homeness with such notions
when he urged students to pursue the locations of profound ideas: “When
an idea is adopted by a group and put into practice, as in a church or a state,
its rate of change will be slow.”{6} An idea that the American churches
and in some ways the society have adopted and put into practice is the uncritical
acceptance of the Bibles worth. Thus Perry Miller observed of the role
of the Old Testament in historic American society: it was “so truly omnipresent
in the American culture of 1800 or 1820 that historians have as much difficulty
taking cognizance of it as of the air people breathed.”{7} It was Jacob
Burckhardt, I believe, who said that the most important things in life do not
get written about by historians simply because they are too close to
people, too taken for granted. This may account for the absence of good histories
dealing with American attitudes toward the Bible.

An example of the way anticritical attitudes
were locked in to the mainline culture appears in an often quoted trio of sentences
by a great American average mind and exemplar of its day-to-day and less than
Lincolnesque civil religion, President Grover Cleveland: “The Bible is
good enough for me, just the old book under which I was brought up. I do not
want notes or criticisms or explanations about authorship or origin or even
cross- references. I do not need them or understand them, and they confuse me.”{8}
What is going on here is a reference to an aspect of the American consensus
juris, the minimal basis of consensus on which civil life is ordered. Such
a consensus may be truly minimal, as cynical observers sometimes suggest. British
student of politics Bernard Crick thought that he had the American version filtered
down to something as terse as the cri de coeur of Groucho Marx, “Take
care of me. I am the only one Ive got.”{9} But one does not need
to spend much time regarding America from afar or near to see that this “nation
with a soul of a church,” to use G. K. Chestertons phrase,{10} has
more than the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution
enshrined in a vault in its archival heart. The Bible also is there.

Nothing is supposed to be, say very sober
historians. They find America seeing itself as an aniconic nation, one that
lacks images or icons. In a brilliant epigraphic choice to illustrate the main
theme of his book The Genius of American Politics, Daniel Boorstin, now
the Librarian of Congress and thus keeper of the archive, compared the American
aniconic intention to a scene in Heinrich Graetzs History of the Jews:
“Pompey then penetrated into the Sanctuary, in order to satisfy his curiosity
as to the nature of the Judaean worship, about which the most contradictory
reports prevailed. The Roman general was not a little astonished at finding
within the sacred recesses of the Holy of Holies, neither an asss head
nor, indeed, images of any sort.”{11} A refusal to fill our sanctuary
with ideological images characterizes American life, say historians like Boorstin.
Yet if they stayed around and took a little longer look in that shrine they
would not find it empty. In the corner, under a layer of dust, there is a leather-bound,
gilt-edged, India-papered object, a Bible, revered as object, as icon,
not only in Protestant churches but in much of the public congregation as well.

Such an observation can be fighting words
in a self-described aniconic culture or set of churches. Yet if we use our terms
with conceptual propriety and great care and are willing to take some risks,
this insightif it holds upcan illumine the history of response to
biblical criticism in America. It can help explain why so many found it possible
to ignore or to resist the main line of biblical scholarship for a century.

Five risks come to mind at once. First,
to use such a vivid image as “image” is to risk confusing instead
of clarifying. A notable and notably difficult Catholic philosopher once made
a distinction between types of abstractions that could apply here to types of
images, metaphors, or similes. At a Catholic philosophers convention he
was comparing notes with his peer. They were discussing how many of their reviewers
commented on the level of abstraction with which they both operated. “Yes,”
said the friend, “but there is a difference. I use enriching abstractions
and you use impoverishing ones.” Some might say that they use clarifying
images and I may be using a confusing one.

Second, the image employed may be inappropriate
because it is too arcane. The icon, for example, is at home in an Eastern Orthodox
Christian culture, where it congenially reposes among its connotations, but
one may do violence by snatching it away from those connotations and resituating
it on the more bare spiritual landscape of America.

At midpoint during our risk assessment
we should mention that to some; the image of the icon is so obvious, so lacking
in subtlety, that to use it adds nothing but banality. “My love is like
a rose.” Of course, everyone knows my, love is like a roseto me.
Americans use the Bible, even as a physical object, as an icon. Of course .
. .

A fourth risk has to do with emotional
connotations. The image can be so vivid that it diverts from inquiry. In the
1950s an opponent of the World Council of Churches who made his living staging
protests against it, found that he scored the strongest points when he pointed
to one of its constituencies: “the bearded Orthodox icon-kissers.”
Being bearded and kissing icons called to mind something so overpowering that
it swept away all the more ordinary functions and images. Thus to say that America
treats the Bible iconically will, in the minds of pure prophets, connote paganism
and thus something bad. (Were this address an essay directed to the American
Academy of Religion and not the Society of Biblical Literature, I would not
have to apologize for mentioning paganism and would not dare mention it pejoratively.
The historians of religion there would immediately score my implicit value judgment
with a question, “Whats the matter with paganism?”) In the
context of this risk I can only urge that we must also keep in mind ordinary
functions of the Bible. Sometimes an image does carry people away. One
thinks of a moment when the late philosopher Herbert Marcuse said something
humorous; that was a noteworthy event, because he usually, figuratively, lumbered
steatopygically across the stage in efforts at being humorous. But, once: “Yes,
yes, I know that the jet airplane is a phallic symbol. But it can also get you
from London to Brussels.” Yes, yes, I know that the Bible is an icon,
but its contents can also be read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested, and
lived by.

A final risk is the notion of pars
pro toto. One can concentrate on a subculture, Protestant conservatism,
which guards the shrine and fights for the iconic object, without noticing that
by 1980 the shrine itself is often neglected. Or if not neglected it is surrounded
by other objects and symbols until it recedes from center stage, no longer informs,
or is lost in a diffusion and confusion of symbols.

These risks notwithstanding, I believe
there are values in using the image of the icon as an effort to lead beyond
merely rational analysis to the root emotions of people in a culture. Only then
can we assess the power situation, which has little to do with the content
of ancient scriptures but much to do with the form of modern American
life.

First we must establish the place of the
Bible among the other fonts and sources of culture. The Bible is a book. The
molecules that make it up constitute paper and ink. The ink is shaped in the
form of letters whose agglomerations in the form of words, sentences, chapters
sign something; they signify,they impart ideas, they at least potentially disclose
meanings. Thus people gain access to other minds or learn something about their
own. Since the meanings come from the past, they may study their history or
analyze them structurally, with special interest in the cast of contemporary
mind. So one would expect that the same Gallup Poll that showed Americans believing
the Bible to be beyond criticism, without error, would also find it being used,
and find it informing life.

Strangely, significantly fewer people
who consider the Bible to be the errorless book of God consult it first when
in trouble. Forty percent turn to it, 27 percent to the Holy Spirit, 11 percent
to the church, and 22 percent to “Other.” So far, so good; the Bible
outranks the other sources of wisdom or consolation. But, writes Walter A. Elwell
in his comment on the disuse of the book, “It is apparently one thing
to believe that the Bible is Gods word [as 72 percent of the polled
public simply does] and quite another to read it.” The general public
average daily readership is 12 percent, with the Protestant average being 18
percent and the Roman Catholic 4 percent. Who reads the Bible less than once
a month? Fifty-two percent of the general public, 41 percent of Protestants,
and 67 percent of Roman Catholics. As for knowledge of the content as opposed
to claimed reading of the book, the figures are even lower. Asked to name the
Ten Commandments, perhaps the most familiar part of both “testaments,”
45 percent of the public could come up with four or fewer; this public found
49 percent of the Protestants and 44 percent of the Catholics able to do so.
Elwell adds: “Belief in God is not much affected by how often people read
the Bible.”{12} The public resists critical analysis of its revered object,
calls this object the Word of God. A minority claims to consult it first in
trouble; yet few read it regularly and not many know its basic contents. This
anomaly occasions an examination of the iconic hold this book exercises.

Let me draw on a frequent experience of
Marxian scholars when they visit Marxist societies. They lecture on articulated
and filiated aspects of DasKapital. They assume that assenting
communists, be they university students or peasants, would be conversant with
many dimensions of the writings of Marx. They report on responses that range
from incomprehension through bemusement to disdain. As one told a friend of
mine, “You are not communicating well. You know too much Marx. You know
where his ideas came from and how he put them together and how they relate and
what they mean. We dont need all that Hegelian metaphysical stuff. We
only need the basic Marxian notion as a trigger to get our revolution going.”
A proletarian or a peasant might not articulate it so well. What the people
need is the awareness that somewhere there is an authority and perhaps an elite
that regards it as, shall we say, inerrant? The society draws security from
the knowledge that an enclosure or a support exists, one that transcends mundane
and practical living.

So it is with the use of the Bible as
an image in a society like that of pluralist America. In a brilliant passage
on icon and image. Rosemary Gordon has written that “every man walks around
in the world enveloped in a carapace of his own images. Their presence enables
him to structure and to organize the multiplicity of the objects and the stimuli
which throng him. . . .”{13} A zoological carapace is “a hard bony
or chitinous outer covering, such as the fused dorsal plates of a turtle, or
the portion of the exoskeleton covering the head and thorax of a crustacean.”
But the dictionary goes on to refer to it as “any similar protective covering.”
Here we are speaking of the protective covering, the sort of cocoon that individuals,
subcultures, and in their own way societies need for the structuring of experience.

Far from using the iconic image disdainfully,
then, I am trying to suggest that it has a value of great anthropological and
psychic significance; without such carapaces people would likely go mad. Relate
this to the observation of Talcott Parsons that “good fortune and suffering
must always, to cultural man, be endowed with meaning. They cannot, except in
limiting cases, be accepted as something that just happens.”{14}
The Bible, in American history and in much of present-day culture, provided
and provides as an object a basic element in the carapace of images, and its
presumed contents, that for which one would consult it if one did consult it,
remove the “just happening” dimension from human existence.

A reach beyond churchly into public culture
demonstrates this kind of location for the Bible as icon. Benjamin Franklin,
who in 1749 chartered and called for “the Necessity of a Publick Religion,”
took pains to speak well of the Bible, whose contents he did not regard as supernatural
at all but whose form he regularly printed and published. When asked to join
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on 4 July 1776 to prepare a great seal of the
United States, this Franklin reached for biblical imagery (of Moses and the
Red Sea), though the design was later compromised.{15}

Under the carapace of organizing images
for the republic, the “founding father” of his country has a central
place. So it is that George Washington is associated with the Bible, even though
the most notable scholar of Washingtons religion says he made “astonishingly
few references” to it in his many volumes of literary remains. While he
accepted a gift of Bibles as “an important present to the brave fellows”
in the military during the Revolution, only one letter in his corpus has a reference
to his own reading of the book. There are few biblical allusions in his writings,
and they are in settings as near to the jocular as Washington ever came. Yet
Washington was a Freemason, and the Masons regarded the Bible as their key icon,
even though they did not regard it as supernatural. Observers took pains to
notice the precedent at the Washington inaugural, when the first president brought
along his Masonic Bible; “the president kissed the Bible after taking
the oath of office.” In 1789 he was thus an unbearded icon-kisser. Later
presidents would upset the images under the carapace were they to neglect or
despise the role of the Bible in their oatheven though the Constitution
is silent on the subject.{16}

Thomas Jefferson did upset the images
by taking the content of the Bible seriously. He appeared to be the great iconoclast
among the fathers. Yet he read the book. We know of 271 religious titles in
the Jeffersonian library. He collected editions of the Bible: two Greek Septuagints,
ten Vulgates, ten Greek New Testaments, one French and six English versions,
with four Apocrypha. “For a man with a reputation for being irreligious
he had an amazing number,” writes an analyst of that library. And Jefferson
was not a collector but a student. From 1804 to 1819 he pieced together his
“wee-little book,” “The Jefferson Bible,” which began
as a moonlighting project in the White House. There he pasted together the nonsupernatural
elements of the Gospels, clipped from English, French, Latin, and Greek versions,
into The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. For this he came to be
thought of as an infidel, and his place in the American evangelical pantheon
was less secure than was that of owners-but-not-readers like Washington, who
probably had the same hermeneutical principles as Jefferson but did not put
them to use.{17}

Abraham Lincoln, the center of American
public faith and its greatest theologian, illustrates the positive role of the
iconic use of the Bible. In the library at Fisk University there reposes a Bible
given Lincoln on 4 July 1864 by the “Loyal Colored People” of Baltimore.
Lincoln responded: “In regard to this Great book, I have but to say, it
is the best gift God has given to man. . . . All the good Savior gave to the
world was communicated through this book. . . . To you I return my most sincere
thanks for the elegant copyof the great Book of God which you
present” [emphasis mine]. It was noted that Lincoln regularly read the
Bible in the White House and that it was the old Lincoln family Bible, a version
from the Society for Promotion of Christian Knowledge (S.P.C.K.) dated 1799such
details always mattered. While Jefferson was a church member but an infidel
for his iconoclasm, Lincoln was well received by the churches, though he is
the only president ever who was not a church member. He had the right attitudes
toward the Bible, whose cadences entered his very speech.

One could further survey the central figures
who have sacerdotal roles a in the public religion and hence in guarding the
sanctuary. We have already heard Grover Cleveland, the first president to be
vocal after critical views of the Bible reached America. Years later another
priestly president, the well-informed historian Woodrow Wilson, made iconic
use of the Bible. John Mulder says of him that “Wilson showed no awareness
of problems in the Bible or controversies surrounding interpretation of its
passages.” The Bible was the standard for the culture, and it spoke to
Wilson and the nation more in terms of law than of grace.{19} Wilson effectively
mounted military crusades using biblical imagery.

One candidate for the presidency did more
than any American scholar or cleric to harden public sentiment against biblical
criticism. William Jennings Bryan was always a populist about religious knowledge.
He spoke critically against the scholarly elite who wanted to make a different
use of the arcanum. “A religion that didnt appeal to any but college
graduates would be over the head or under the feet of 99 per cent of our people.”
Bryan, of course was not everyones chosen keeper of the sanctuary, and
many in his time and ever since repudiated him or even saw his latter-day opposition
to criticism to be a mark of senility. Yet Bryan gained a broad following, and
showed both an iconic and an unreflective use of the Bible in many exchanges
during the Scopes trial, which had to do with biblical literalism. Asked by
his antagonist Clarence Darrow about certain calculations of historical biblical
accounts of the The Deluge, Bryan replied:

I never made a calculation.

Darrow: What do you think?

Bryan: I do not think about things I dont
think about.

Darrow: Do you think about things you
do think about?

Bryan: Well, sometimes.

Liberal America scorned Bryan for his
literalism and was sure that his fundamentalist outlook, soon a mark of disgrace,
would disappear from the scene. It happened, however, that many to Bryans
right felt that he let them down because there were moments in the trial when
he allowed cracks in their carapace. He was not perfectly literal about the
biblical accounts at all times. Bryan never deserted or changed his boyhood
biblical faith, which gave him security for political contingencies and defeats.
“Give the modernist three words, allegorical, poetical,
and symbolically,” said Bryan in 1923, “and he can suck
the meaning out of every vital doctrine of the Christian Church and every passage
in the Bible to which he objects.”{20} Darrow slew his thousands, but
in pious America, Bryan slew his ten thousands.

This attitude in moderate form continues
in the 1980s. President Jimmy Carter did what he could to evade questions that
might draw him away from defense of biblical literalism. Whatever Americans
thought of him politically, the polls found them admiring his moral construct
based on reverence for the Bible. And his successor, Ronald Reagan, was not
out of character or tradition when during the presidential campaign he pointed
to the icon and said with an emphasis few evangelical clerics would be bold
enough to use: “It is an incontrovertible fact that all the complex
and horrendous questions confronting us at home and worldwide have their answer
in that single book”{21} [emphasis mine].

Perhaps I have dwelt too long on presidential
candidates, but vote-getters in their public expressions are custodians of the
national carapace and the images under it. One could as well point to the role
of the Bible as an object in legislative halls or, more vividly, to the part
the Bible plays in judicial history in the context of “the nine high priests
in their black robes” in the Supreme Court. It is in the courts that all
but a few dissenting individuals take their oath on the Bible so consistently
that in colloquial America one swears on “a stack of Bibles,” to
prove ones seriousness. The Supreme Court has been seen as the great iconoclastic
desecrator because it “took the Bible out of the schools,” when
it limited not the pedagogical but the devotional use of the book in public
institutions.

The Court did no such thing. The public
had “taken the Bible out of the schools,” but, significantly for
my thesis, it did not know or does not even now know that it did this. What
mattered under the carapace of images in the national mind was that the Bible
belonged in classroom devotion. Yet a year or two before the Supreme Court decisions
of 1962 and 1963according to social scientist Richard Dierenfeld, who
took pains to take a surveynot many were reading the Bible in schools.
Even “without comment,” as one should read it if it is an icon beyond
interpretation, few read it. About 42 percent of the respondents were still
reading it, thanks to the heritage of the older parts of the country. The putatively
profane East found almost 68 percent of its classrooms in public schools still
using the Bible, and over 75 percent of the Southern districts reported such
use. But in the other half of the Bible Belt, the Midwest, only about 18 percent
did. And in the West, including California, whence came so many protests to
the Court against “taking the Bible out of the schools,” only 11
percent kept the practice. (By the way, where the Bible was used, 70 percent
chose the King James Version, which until the 1950s was almost universally the
iconic version.) But if the Bible survived devotionally, which usage
underscores our point, its contents were not subjects of analysis. Are there
Bible classes of any sort in your schools? Now one-tenth as many
polled districts, 4.51 percent nationally, replied in the affirmative. In the
South 9 percent, in the East barely 1 percent, in the Midwest 4 percent, and
in the West fewer than 9 percent of the districts looked at the contents.{22}

The Bible worked its way into the schools
as icon because in sectarian America it was seen as “nonsectarian,”
and the “not commented upon” aspect was to assure objectivity in
its use. Horace Mann, a Unitarian cleric, as much as anyone else helped establish
this use of the Bible in schools. His form of comment or interpretation would
have been abhorrent in most of the Protestant then-dominant culture of his own
day. After World War II a follower of John Dewey and an advocate of a postbiblical
nonsectarian religion of democracy, Chaplain J. Paul Williams, commented critically
on this iconic use: “This belief in the efficacy of spending a few minutes
daily in reading the Bible grew up in a time when it was almost universally
believed by Protestants that there was some kind of magic in the Bible to which
one needed but to be exposed in order for it to have a very great influence
on life.”{23}

In the unofficial but privileged mainstream
American literary culture there was an almost immediate acceptance of biblical
critical outlooks, a fact that gave this culture a marginal status in what today
we would call “Middle America.” Already in his sermon of 1841 on
“The Transient and Permanent in Christianity,” Theodore Parker showed
his awareness: “Modern criticism is fast breaking to pieces this idol
which men have made out of the scriptures.” Parker helped import radical
German criticism, such as De Wettes “Einleitung.” Others were
iconoclastic enough to point to iconodulism among Bible-believers who were,
they thought, not Bible-readers or Bible-followers. Thus Henry David Thoreau:
“It is remarkable that, notwithstanding the universal favor with which
the New Testament is outwardly received, and even the bigotry with which it
is defended, there is no hospitality shown to, there is no appreciation of,
the order of truth with which it deals. I know of no book that has so few readers.”{25}
This was still in the period before critical study was widespread.

A towering mainstream literary figure
of the generation in which knowledge of biblical criticism reached the public
was Oliver Wendell Holmes. In 1869 he wrote Frederic H. Hedge:

The truth is staring the Christian world
in the face, that the stories of the old Hebrew books cannot be taken as literal
statements of fact. But the property of the church is so large and so mixed
up with its vested beliefs, that it is hopeless to expect anything like honest
avowal of the convictions which there can be little doubt intelligent church
men of many denominations, if at all, entertain. It is best, I suppose, it
should be so, for take idolatry and bibliolatry out of the world all at once
as the magnetic mountain drew the nails and bolts of Sindbads ship,
and the vessel that floats much of the best of our humanity would resolve
itself in a floating ruin of planks and timbers. . . .{26}

We do not need to accept Holmess
conspiracy theory about ecclesiasticism to agree with his understanding, one
that under different images matches our own, that a carapace of images is necessary
in order for individuals and society to function cognitively or morally.

As in public religion or literary culture,
so in popular social behavior there are evidences on all hands of the iconic
use of the Bible in America. These may be losing out in many elements of “postbiblical”
pluralist America, and the recent distancing from the Bible may be part of the
presumed chaos, malaise, or anomie of such a culture. People suffer from what
Robert Jay Lifton calls “historical, or psychohistorical dislocation,”
which he saw to be the “break in the sense of connection men have long
felt with vital and nourishing symbols of their cultural traditionssymbols
revolving around . . . religion.” This breach in tradition is accompanied
by a “flooding of imagery because of mass communications networks.”{27}
Some of the contemporary political polemics from the American right results
from reaction against this breach, this flooding.

Only some of the rejection was thoughtless,
thanks to the passing of time. At least in the years of the rejective counterculture
or wherever “now” people advocated historical amnesia as liberating,
it is the biblical culture that serves as a foil. But the rejection has not
been successful or complete, so locked into the corners of the carapace of images
have been awarenesses of the Bible. Culture critic Eugene Goodheart rose up
at the height of such rejection to speak with historical sense and sanity about
the moment. He referred more to the content of the traditions than I am in the
present instance, but the point is still in place:

The tabula rusa is a presumption
of innocence. It is not the result of genuine discovery, for instance, that
the Christian and classical traditions are no longer part of us. The enactments
of our personality and character are involuntary, often compulsive. We are
not free to choose what we are or even what we will do. We cannot simply wish
away traditions that we have grown to dislike. The very dislike may be conditioned
by the fact that they still possess us, if we do not possess them. If Judeo-Christian
and classical traditions are still alive in all of us (and I suspect they
are), despite attempts to deny them, then an education that fails to address
itself to these traditions (I do not speak of arguing for or against them)
would fail according to the ideal of relevance. The mere repudiation of these
traditions does not have the effect of exorcism.{28}

No doubt I was invited to a centennial
observance of biblical scholarship as a historian of American social and religious
behavior. Here it would be easy to display expertise in that field and prolong
the essay by showing all the ways in which the Bible as the object that embodies
the center of Good-hearts “Judeo-Christian” religion endures
iconically. Instead of documenting I shall only point, to stimulate the vision
and imagination of professional biblical scholars concerning their context and
environment. Some pointings:

Americans have an adjectival use of the
noun “Bible” as one indicator: Bible belt, Bible camp, Bible believer,
Bible Sunday, Bible week, Bible school, Bible institute, Bible college, Bible
battle, Bible bookstore, Bible puzzles and crosswords and quizzes, Gideon Bible
in airplane and hospital and hotel room (enhanced in the Mormon Marriott by
a Book of Mormon). There are tours to Bible lands, and Bibles brought back with
covers made of wood from the Mount of Olives. The Bible is a gift at rites of
passage, to new mothers, in Sunday school, at confirmation, in white covers
for marriages, at graduations, for bon voyage. Protestants who always
found the Catholic practice of burying grandmothers with an object like a rosary
repulsive characteristically buried grandmother with a black Bible. The family
Bible is also the place between whose testaments one is always going to fill
out the family tree, as ancestors once did.

Bibles are as ubiquitous in hotel rooms
as wire coat hangers. Have any of us ever seen an old one, a used one, a spinecracked
version? What happens to them? A Second City comic would have it that one does
not know either where wire coat hangers come from. They are absent when one
checks in but still mysteriously proliferating by the time one checks out. Could
the Gideon Bible be a wire coat hanger in its larval or pupal stages? No one
has seen an old Bible in the garbage. Nor are Bibles burned, except when defenders
of the iconic King James attacked the National Council of Churches desecrating
Revised Standard Version as “Stalins Bible.” When that RSV
was issued, an iconodule figured out that the first edition consumed twenty
million square inches of twenty-three carat gold leaf, enough to make a twenty-four
foot wide sheet one mile long, and that the Bibles of that first years
edition, all of which soon were sold, could be stacked high enough to equal
one hundred Empire State Buildings. In 1954 CatholicDigest estimated
that two hundred million Bibles were in circulation, far more than one per citizen
of all agesand probably a low figure, were one to add all the atticked
and betrunked versions in semicirculation.{29}

The Bible legitimates other expressions.
Cecil B. De Mille learned that he could serve up magic and miracle and sex as
long as the main images were sanctified by reference to the Bible. A few biblical
lines about Bathsheba or Delilah were enough to keep Susan Hayward or Gina Lolabrigida
in motion on screen for an hour and a half, before a public that was not then
yet free to watch in clear conscience similar unclad secular imagery.

Even in those parts of Protestant culture
that do not favor magic, superstition, or relics, the Bible is allowed a special
role. The stories of soldiers whose lives were spared because they had a bullet-proof
covered New Testament in their breast pocket are so frequent that one almost
pictures an army with people tilting by the weight of the book to their left
sides. In frontier folklore there were stories of infidels and deists who on
death beds faced the horror of hell because they had “burned all the Bibles
they could get.” A Methodist itinerant, it was said, faced off a robber
in Chillicothe, Ohio, who let him go when he saw the Bible. The victim was “more
than thankful for my Bible, which had served me better than a revolver. This
was a new kind of weapon, the merits of which he appeared to have no desire
to contest.” The wife of a circuit rider needed money for provisions while
her husband was on the road and she was ill. She asked for a Bible, “intending
to seek comfort from its holy counsels, opened it, found a five dollar bill.”{30}
These stories have not disappeared from the culture of television evangelism,
where miracles associated with the physical object of the Bible continue.

So much for the Protestant/Enlightenment-formed
general culture. The case is little different in Judaism, which in America has
been forced to be “more biblical than it is.” Jewish scholars constantly
point to the transformations of Judaism and its texts during the past twenty-seven
centuries, showing that the Bible is only a part of their tradition. But just
as rabbis, who are lay people in Europe, have to be clerics in American culture
to round out the priest-minister-rabbi trifaith triad, so Jews have had to be
“people of the book” in America in a special normative sense.
Literalist understandings of the Bible among premillennial fundamentalists in
America have blunted anti-Semitism and led to surprising coalescences between
Jews and evangelicals who must keep respect for Jews because of Jewish reverence
for the Hebrew Scriptures.

Solomon Schechter, dedicating the Jewish
Theological Seminary in New York in 1903, summarized the case for America and
Judaism:

If there is a feature in American religious
life more prominent than any other it is in its conservative tendency. . .
. This country is, as everybody knows, a creation of the Bible, particularly
the Old Testament, and the Bible is still holding its own, exercising enormous
influence as a real spiritual power in spite of all the destructive tendencies,
mostly of foreign make. . . . The bulk of the real American people have, in
matters of religion, retained their sobriety and loyal adherence to the Scripture,
as their Puritan forefathers did. America thus stands for wideness of scope
and for conservatism.{31}

The iconic case is weakest in the instance
of Roman Catholicism, as Gallup polls and cultural evidences show. In the liturgy
the priest kisses the Gospel. Catholic conservatives point to Providentissimus
Deus of 1893 to certify their at-homeness with Protestant doctrines of inerrancy.
But Catholicism was not under the carapace in the nineteenth century. It was
the fact that Catholics had other icons, talismans, relics, amulets, and sacramentals
that kept them in part from being seen as “true Americans” by the
others. The Nativist battles of the 1840s make this clear. In October of 1842
an overfervent priest in Carbeau, New York, angry because the King James Version
was being distributed in his parish, burned some Bibles. Bishop John Hughes,
“Dagger John,” spoke up: “To burn or otherwise destroy a spurious
or corrupt copy of the Bible, whose circulation would tend to disseminate erroneous
principles of faith or morals, we hold to be an act not only justifiable but
praiseworthy.” A wave of Bible burnings was said to ensue, and this was
followed by larger waves of Nativist anti-Catholic sentiment.{32}

Yet even if the Catholic case for faith
did not depend only on the Bible but also on “the tradition,” Catholics
were also wary of anything that touched this icon. Cardinal William OConnell,
later Archbishop of Boston, remembered how in the 1880s at the American College
in Rome students had discussed higher criticism, which had its source “mostly
in Germany, from a group of clever agnostics whose plain purpose was to destroy
completely the fundamentals of the Christian faith by a well-planned attack
upon the whole system of divine revelation. . . .{33} To Catholics as
to others, higher criticism was un-American, foreign, alien. The Americanist
and Modernist controversies found the few early Catholic critics undercut and
displaced. And today, as Catholics link up with conservatives in many causes,
the polemical columnistsone thinks of the weekly efforts in the National
Catholic Registerconsistently attack biblical criticism as a desecration
of the book thataccording to Gallupfew Catholics read.

The case for seeing the Bible as Americas
iconic book is both most important and most startling in the instance of Protestantismmost
important in that today it is hard to picture how dominant was Protestantism
for three centuries, while the creencias and vigencias, the root
ideas and the binding customs, of the culture were being programed and set.
Yet in the British colonies that made up the original United States, non-Protestant
religious expression was almost nonexistent outside Maryland, southern Pennsylvania,
and on occasion Rhode Island and New York City. Not until the great continental
Catholic migrations to America in the 1840s and the Jewish influx after the
1880s did other religious voices begin to gain power and privilege.

If important, it was also startling that
the Bible became an icon, for Protestantism for the most partexcept in
its liturgically high wingshas seen itself as aniconic and even iconoclastic.
C. J. Jung wrote from a psychological point of view about a stereotype cherished
in many disciplines:

The history of the development of Protestantism
is one of chronic iconoclasm. One wall after another fell. And the work of
destruction was not too difficult, either, when once the authority of the
church had been shattered. We all know how, in large things as in small, in
general as well as in particular, piece after piece collapsed, and how the
alarming impoverishment of symbolism that is now the condition of life came
about. The power of the church has gone with that loss of symbolism, too.”{34}

Protestants were nervous because, while
images also represent other a things, they could displace unseen realities
and thus lead to the worship of created objects or, in short, to idolatry. Protestants
failed to discriminate between reverence for icons and worship of images. Albert
C. Moore draws the distinction finely, and I quote him because this is crucial
for my theme, which is not a charge that America worships the Bible as
an idol. “When the icon is treated with reverence in the context of worship,
this attitude can be described as iconolatry, veneration of the
icon. This term should be used in preference to the term idolatry
which has so many censorious and pejorative associations in Western usage. .
. .”

Are the objections raised against idolatry
applicable to the use of images? At the very least one must ask what is the
source of the information concerning alleged idolaters; was it, asks Moore,
from biased observers?

For instance, at the Reformation both
Catholics and Protestants agreed that idolatry was forbidden to Christians
by the Bible; but they disagreed over the question as to when an image became
idolatrous: At no time was it possible to prove that idolatry was taking
place, since the worship of a created thing in place of God occurs in the
mind of the worshipper rather than in the image addressed.{35}

In other words, were some Protestants
and other Americans “Bibliolators,” as beleaguered biblical critics
sometimes cried out in counterattack? They may have acted like idolaters.
But, following Moore, how do we know if they were? It is far fairer to say that
they were iconodules or iconolatrous people, so long as this observation does
not include an implied theological denunciation. It means taking believers at
their word and watching them at their work.

If I may condense more of Moores
argument to explain why Americans of Protestant stripe could reverence the Bible
as an icon, there are five points to stress. First, an image evokes the experience
of the numinous. Second, it captures a religious experience that is valued as
a continuing reality, so that each confrontation of the image allows for repetition
of the experience even if in frozen form. Third, the image embodies
a manifestation of sacred power and presence that is then celebrated in myth
and ritual, in sacred space and time. Thus the Bible is the book of worship
as well. Fourth, the image offers the worshiper an ideal archetype or sacred
model for the sake of regular transformation. One “grows into” the
plot of the Bible, and in the childs imagination its landscape and characters
are as familiar as is the view out the window. Finally, the image enables one
to be related to the cosmos, for it is a microcosm with which one can identify.
One almost needs a physical object for gathering images under the individual
and collective psychic carapace.{36}

Ordinarily the books on religious iconography
include images taken from the Bible, but they rarely if ever notice the Bible
itself as icon. Yet on soil where other icons were prohibited, the same five
needs or roles that Moore cited remained operative, and Protestant-minded America
took to the use of the Bible to fill them.

On American Protestant soil, the Quakers
come nearest to being aniconic people, at least in relation to the Bible, though
not a few prophets in their midst accused their fellow believers of “lapsing”
in this respect. And latter-day (but by no means early) Unitarian-Universalism
may have moved far enough from biblical norms to have put the book aside. Beyond
that, it survives. In colonial Puritanism where there was to be no adornment
or distraction in the beautifully simple meeting house, the Bible was allowed
to be oversize far beyond the function it was to have served. Certainly not
all the buildings were so dark or the preachers eyes so weak that such
enormous print in such huge volumes was necessary. The leather binding, the
high placement on reading desk or pulpit, the focus of eyes on the Bookall
these enhanced the iconic aspect of worship and the Bible. In paintings of pilgrims
heading for worship in colonial New England, the gun and the Bible are the standard
images.

On the frontier, the circuit rider had
to be a light traveler. A bit of rum under the saddlebags (until temperance
made its way), a few personal necessities, perhaps a Book of Disciplinethese
were all that went along with the evangelist on the trail. Except for the Bible.
Even Quakers used the Bible as a “civilizing” instrument in their
work among the Indians.

As for blacks, what Hylan Lewis said about
“Kent” applies widely: “References to the Biblewhich
are frequentare verbal props used to prove, document, underscore, or just
to display a kind of erudition. The Bible says . . . is an expression
used by even the most profane and secular when occasion demands.”{37}
The slaves were not permitted the Bible, but every chronicler reports their
love for it and on the way the book itself became a symbol of liberation. Carter
G. Woodson says that “Negroes . . . almost worshiped the Bible, and their
anxiety to read it was their greatest incentive to learn.” Reports of
fugitive slaves liked to stress that they carried “a big Bible,”
hardly a useful object in the precarious passage on the underground railway.
Of course, the content of the Bible, its message of hope and liberation, meant
much to people denied the book as object or literacy as access, but they regarded
the book numinously as did their white brothers and sisters.

As for recent times, Protestant America
by mid-century was taking on the attitudes the Gallup survey found to be extant
in 1980. In a Catholic Digest survey, 83 percent of the Protestants regarded
the Bible as the revealed word of God, but 40 percent of the Protestants read
it “never or hardly ever.”{39} In a survey of a very Protestant
county in Bible-believing mid-America, Victor Obenhaus found that 63 percent
of churchgoing Protestants could not designate any differences between the Old
and New Testaments, few knew a single thing about the prophets, few could apply
the story of the Good Samaritan to life, and biblical materials as such were
“only slightly comprehended,”{40} despite weekly access to these
themes in church. I have often suggested that this same population cohort could
spend one evening of three hours in a community college on the Bhagavad-Gita
and know more of it than they gain by way of knowledge of the Bible through
a lifetime. Yet all reverence the book; they might join in denominational warfare
against critics who might challenge its literal truth or in political conflict
against courts that would “take it out of the schools.” The knowledge
that the Bible is cherished, is a supreme authority, and is available to experts
like preachers who can consult it is more important than a exploration of the
contents. Bible classes seem most popular where the contents of the Bible are
least critically examined, whereas when the Bible is an object of scrutiny and
study the iconic sense disappears and the crowds dwindle.

In the political realm, iconoclasts have
learned to keep their distance from the Protestants on the subject of the Bible
if they wish to win any causes. In the 1890s radical feminists began to prepare
a Women s Bible in order to counteract what they felt were anti-women
passages and emphases in the use of the Bible. But in 1895 Susan B. Anthony
showed political savvy when she wrote Elizabeth Cady Stanton: “No1
dont want my name on that Bible CommitteeYou fight that battleand
leave me to fight the secularthe political fellows. ... I simply dont
want the enemy to be diverted from my practical ballot fightto that of
scoring me for belief one way or the other about the Bible.” Stanton went
ahead, and lost power. She had no idea about the level of denunciation she would
receive, including from Protestant male clerics who supported both the Bible
and the rights of women. She made the mistake of saying, “We have made
a fetich [sic] of the Bible long enough. The time has come to read it
as we do all other books. ...” Even nonreaders who were supporters of
the Bible were not ready to hear that.{41}

In a centennial observance of biblical
scholarship in America it is natural for us to test the iconic thesis on the
founders of the discipline. The last thing any of them wanted to be was a destroyer
of the Bible. They were virtually unanimous in their theme that biblical criticism,
historical and structural and analytic in character alike, would enhance faith
in an age of science. To this day biblical scholars in the ecclesiastical community
are frustrated when given no chance to show their fellow believers among the
laity how much more exciting is ones pursuit of the “acts of God”
through the environmental and contextual studies they cherish or the formal
inquiries that lay bare so many dimensions of a text. They have fused critical
scholarship and faith, and wonder why others are not allowed to share their
enthusiasm. Yet in most denominations they know that partisans of anticritical
outlooks can always exploit the iconic sense of people and go on to suggest
that there will be less, not more, Bible as well as less, not more, faith, once
one enters the mental furnished apartment in which the critic has no choice
but to live.

In the beginning, when critical scholarship
had its first pre-Civil War hearings, Edward Robinson was the patriarch, the
only American to gain an international hearing. Robinson set the theme: “It
has ever been the glory of the Protestant Faith, that it has placed the Scriptures
where they ought to be, above every human name, above every human authority.
THE BIBLE IS THE ONLY AND SUFFICIENT RULE OF FAITH AND PRACTICE.”{42}

In the first critical generation, the
celebrity preachers, the ones Winthrop Hudson called “Princes of the Pulpit”{43
}almost to a personT. DeWitt Talmadge was the exceptionaccepted
biblical criticism as an advancement of the Protestant principle and an enhancement
of faith in a scientific age. Only a few critics who were spoiling for a fight
made their case less plausible by doing violence to the iconic sense of the
Bible or the iconolatry of their attackers. Thus Charles Briggs was sarcastic
about the “Bibliolatry” that treated the Bible magically instead
of as “paper, print, and binding.” Yet even such iconoclasts felt
that they were helping the Bible in the public arena: “We have forced
our way through the obstructions; let us remove them from the face of the earth,
that no man hereafter may be kept from the Bible.”{44} Briggs and other
early critics regularly defended themselves by saying that no scholars would
give a lifetime to the study of a book in which they did not believe. That,
however, was not a telling point among conservatives who were fed a diet of
stories that told how infidels from the Enlightenment to Robert Ingersoll studied
the Bible in order to destroy it.

William Rainey Harper is an ideal type
of the reverent biblical critic who did expend his energies sharing the critical
outlook for the purpose of extending and deepening faith also among the laity,
and for half a generation it worked. In 1892 he gave a speech on “The
Rational and the Rationalistic Higher Criticism” at Chautauqua. First,
the iconic regard:

Can we, in the multiformity of the work
which lies before us during the few weeks of our sojourn together, find anything
in which we possess a common interest? At first thought it would seem impossible
to name a subject related directly or indirectly to the work of all of us;
but if we think again, if we recall the place occupied among us by the Bible,
a place fundamental in all thought and life; if we recall the conflict of
opinion which to-day rages on every side about the Bible, a conflict in which
most vital interests are concerned; if we remember that in this conflict the
principles at stake are principles of universal character and applicationif
we think of all this, I fancy we shall agree that the question of the higher
criticism of the Bible is one in which we have a common interest, and one,
the consideration of which at this time and place will not be inappropriate.

In other words: only the Bible would bring
them together, and only biblical criticism would quicken their inquiries. Harper
recognized that “criticism” conveys “to some minds an unpleasant
idea, but the right usage of the word carries with it nothing of this kind.
. . . Do you ask what criticism is in its technical sense? I answer in a single
word, inquiry. The whole business of a critic is to make inquiry.”
Then Harper went on to criticize the rationalism of both the conservative scholastic
defenders of the Bible and the rationalists themselves. He wanted a scientific
not a “scientifistic” view of the Bible.

Then came the pastoral and faith-building
sense of the critic:

Great care, therefore, must be exercised,
lest the learner, whether a professional student or a casual listener, be
led to give up old positions before new positions have been formulated. The
proper spirit is the building spirit, but the more natural spirit and the
more easily developed is the destructive spirit.

Harper was confident, as were most of
the other pioneers, that if the reverently critical approach were to be adopted,
“the man who has believed without knowing why will have an intelligent
basis for his faith,” but Harper did not recognize that “believing
without knowing why” better satisfied the wishes and wants of people whose
view of the Bible as icon did not need another base. The critical approach would
further remove grounds of hostility and skepticism. And the large class of people
who had been coolly indifferent would learn “that this Book is what it
purports to be, the word of God. ... It will become to them a thing of life,
not because it has changedit has always been alivebut because they
have changed toward it.” To a “destructive” or “objective”
critic, of course, Harper would have been dismissed as an iconolatrous believer
programed by his Sunday school faith in childhood with presuppositions that
would not let him read the Bible as he would “any other book.”

As Harper heard it, “the cry of
our times is for the application of scientific methods to the study of the Bible,”
but he heard the cries of University of Chicago students and the lay elite,
while Grover Cleveland probably spoke for louder cries when he wanted an uncommented-upon
Book. “If,” Harper continued, “the methods of the last century
continue to hold exclusive sway, the time will come when intelligent men of
all classes will say, If this is your Bible we will have none of it!”
And Harper wrote an epitaph for himself that he could have applied to most of
his contemporaries in the critical circle: “He has done what he could
to build up not only an interest in the study of the Scriptures, but a faith
in their divine origin.”{45}

For half a generation, Harper and the
Chautauquans, the university extension propagators, and some of the lay elite
or princes of the pulpit made some progress, but in the end it was not the scientific
outlook that drew the masses but the pre- or anticritical views of the Dwight
L. Moodys and Billy Sundays that prevailed. There is some pathos in the attempt
of Harper and the “scientists,” one that I am reminded of in the
similar courting principles of a modern young subject of a limerick:

A free-living damsel named Hall

Once went to a birth control ball.

She took an appliance

To make love with science;

But nobody asked her at all.

Harry Emerson Fosdick from the twenties
through the forties of this century was the last “prince of the pulpit,”
the last celebrity cleric, who effectively propagated the biblical critical
view as an enhancement of faith to huge audiences and readerships. Since then
we have seen a “collapse of the middle” between the world of the
scholars on one hand and the lay and sometimes the preaching public on the other.

Believing critics have seldom gotten much
help in the larger culture. The press, beginning early in this century, knew
it could always create sensation by dwelling on the iconic regard for the Bible
and then “exposing” the iconoclasm of critical elitists. The Cosmopolitan
magazine turned loose a writer named Harold Boice, who month after month toured
the major campuses and spread shocking news of how the scholars treated the
Bible as a great spiritual book but not as the unique book of God.{46}

Through the twenties of this century humanists
like H. L. Mencken, Ben Hecht, Clarence Darrow, Joseph Wood Krutch, Walter Lippmann,
and others found it convenient, however historically inaccurate it was, to treat
fundamentalist biblicism as normative Christianity from which modern biblical
critics were falling. In fact, this spirit lived on into the 1970s in the hands
of Princeton philosopher Walter Kaufmann, who accused anyone of a developmental
view of “gerrymandering” theology. The biblical critic has therefore
progressively withdrawn into the company of other professionals and has become
inept when denominational politics or cultural assault see him or her as an
iconoclast.

Where does this history leave us? I shall
set forth a few summary remarks, each of which needs further development.

(1) The critical approach in the course
of the century established itself in the academy. Opponents on their turf seem
apologetic and defensive, knowing that their battle for scholarship that would
repeal “the crisis of historical consciousness” or would move people
out of the mental furnished apartments characterized by the critical outlook
is an uphill task.

(2) Biblical scholars in the academy
are expected to reflect only humanistic (humanities-based) concerns, employing
critical methods on the Bible just as they find their colleagues using them
on the Iliad or Shakespeare. They are not to claim special privileges
for their work or their texts. And like all other humanists, they can expect
the respect and curiosity of a small circle of colleagues.

(3) Biblical scholars in the context of
religious communities, in church-related colleges, theological schools,
church and synagogue, or the proreligious but nonpracticing public have no such
luxury. They deal with texts that are engendered by a community and that engender
community and, though some complain of this situation, it is from such communities
that they gain a kind of power. But they have reason to complain when political
forces in those communities keep them from gaining a fair hearing.

(4) About half the Protestant community,
some of the Jewish community, and an indeterminate number in the Catholic community,
have ignored or resisted the century of scholarship. The critic is in
a position not unlike that of the poet in Dylan Thomass vision, whose
“craft and sullen art” concern the lovers who lie abed, unheeding.
The believing public, for reasons of preoccupation, faith, or whatever, pays
little notice.

(5) I have argued that the main reason
for ignoring or resisting critical scholarship has been the iconic regard for
the Bible as an object in the national shrine, whether read or not, whether
observed or not: it is seen as being basic to national and religious communities
existence. They hold it in awe and give latreia to it.

(6) This iconic sense puts critical scholars
at a disadvantage because they will also appear to be iconoclastic by
the mere fact that they engage in inquiry. The media show that one can always
be controversial if treating the Bible in any way other than iconically.

(7) Biblical scholars for the most
part are aware of this situation because the vast majority of themcan
we get surveys to confirm or refute the impression?were nurtured in childhood
in “Jerusalem,” not “Athens.” Few come to critical study
of the Bible through a random search for texts in the context of humanities.
Most come through the passages of faith and life inspired by childhood experience
of the Bible as icon in mind, home, church, and culture. Since the critical
sense has enlivened their adult lives, they are often mystified about why everyone
else does not make their passage. This seventh point has to be based more on
personal observation than extensive defensible empirical inquiry, and I can
only invite the community of scholars to begin to test it on each other.

(8) As for the future, it may be that
our secular-pluralist culture is becoming so differentiated, its norms so diffuse,
that each generation will see the Bible surrounded by an increasing number of
icons, until it loses centrality. It is not likely that in foreseeable
futures there will be no icons in the subcommunities of national life, for under
the carapace of individual and social existence it remains necessary to have
a framework for organizing effects and impressions. That the Bible has held
such a position for such a significant number of Americans has been good for
biblical scholars, who cannot help being curious about the future and who are
not likely to be on the sidelines as that future unfolds. The second century
of biblical scholarship in America therefore promises to be anything but settled
and stale. That, I should surmise, is how biblical scholars would choose to
have things.

Notes

* This is an expansion of a paper read
at the centennial meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in Dallas, November
1980. I wish to acknowledge the research assistance of Mr. R. Scott Appleby.

1. Papers and Speeches of the Church
Congress (New York, 1897) 104.

2. Quoted in Public Opinion 14
(7 January 1893) 333.

3. Walter A. Elwell (“Belief and
the Bible: A Crisis of Authority,” Christianity Today [21 March
1980] 19-23) reports on the poll by Gallup.

4. Suzanne K. Langer, Philosophy in
a New Key (New York: New American Library, 1952) 41,39.

19. John Mulder, Woodrow Wilson: The
Years of Preparation (Princeton: Princeton Universitv, 1978) 49; Stokes,
Church and State, 2. 549.

20. Bryan is quoted in the Truth-seeker
26 (29 June 1929) 402. The exchange with Darrow is quoted in George Marsden,
Fundamentalism in American Culture; The Shaping of American Evangelicalism
1870-1925 (New York: Oxford University, 1980) 187. On the other attitudes
of Bryan, see Lawrence W. Levine, Defender of the Faith: William Jennings
Bryan: The Last Decade, 1915-1925 (New York: Oxford University, 1965) 247,
281, 292.